Swan Point Marina - at a dock

We see this house every year, a pink house and a pink boat

We passed through many areas that gave us fits on the way south in the fall for today they were no problem, they've all been dredged! Included in the dredged list is Carolina Beach inlet at the ICW, Mason inlet and Topsail inlet. They all had 12 to 15 ft at low tide, what a relief to pass through without high tide.

Swan Point Marina is not for everyone, it's rustic but location is everything

However, money being what it is, they only dredged the channel charted on your chartplotter so don't venture outside that channel. This feature gave a few strange situations. For example, at Carolina Beach inlet there's G155 which had been moved several times to direct boaters away from active shoaling. Once they dredged, they left G155 where it wound up and didn't move it back to the edge of the dredged channel, at least not yet. So if you hug G155 you'll run aground since it now sits in a shoaling area (which is why they dredged in the first place). I made an entry in Active Captain to that effect.

Many "rustic" boats too

A similar situation happened at Mason Inlet by the ICW. After it was dredged, they apparently didn't move the red markers which were on top of a shoal. If you hug R122A you will go aground. All you have to do is split the red/green markers for deep water, a straight shot.

We took an outside face dock, it's too shallow inside

We arrived at Swan Point Marina to find no one around to help us dock. It seems the mother and daughter team that used to run the marina did not renew their lease and they are gone. The one covering person was not around so we managed to dock by ourselves. I supposed that also means no fresh bread in the morning too. We used to get a delivery of baked bread before we left, a nice touch.

There's some bad weather coming Friday and Saturday so I made reservations in Beaufort at Homer Smith Docks and Marina. We've never been to Beaufort and we're looking forward to it.